Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Searching for some good article ideas for your next nonprofit newsletter, blog post or website update? Here are 15 places you can look for article ideas.

1. At the receptionist’s desk. Ask whoever answers your organization’s main phone number for the top three questions they get from callers and turn the answers into newsletter articles.

2. In your PowerPoint files. Look at the presentations you’ve given or written for others to give. Pull out a slide or two and turn them into articles.

3. In your annual report. Odds are that most people who receive your nonprofit annual report won’t read it cover to cover. Pull out an excerpt about an accomplishment you are especially proud of and expand it into a newsletter article.

4. In your board minutes. What topical questions did your board members ask at the last meeting? If they are asking those questions, chances are others who are interested in your organization’s work would enjoy knowing your answers too.

5. In your newsletter archive. What did you write about this time last year? Can you freshen up an old article or provide a timely update on something you’ve covered before?

6. In the headlines. Look at the last week’s worth of headlines from your local newspaper. What issues are they covering and how are those news items related to your work?

7. In survey results. Are you querying your donors, clients, or members about the issues they care about (it’s a great idea)? If so, write an article related to one particular statistic generated by the survey.

8. In your “sent” email box. Look at the types of questions you are getting and answering over email and turn those into articles.

9. In your “saved” email folder. Look at the messages you are saving. Do they contain any information that your newsletter readers would enjoy?

10. In your desk calendar. Think about hooks tied into holidays and other special days on the calendar. June includes Father’s Day on the 17th and the first day of summer on the 21st.

11. On lists of special weeks and months. There’s a long list of designated special months. For example, June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, National Iced Tea Month, and Rebuild Your Life Month. Chase’s Calendar of Events is the ultimate source for all such occasions.

12. Out your office window. Let what you see outside inspire you, including the seasons. See my previous post on newsletter ideas for summer.

13. In a keyword research tool. Find new phrases related to your favorite topics. Try Google’s free Keyword Tool. For example, if you type in advocacy, it will return bill of rights, civil rights, community service, child care, domestic violence, and more. Alternate keywords like these can help you find new story angles for the same topics you usually cover.

14. In your web stats. Look at your website statistics and you’ll find what keywords people are using at the search engines that are directing traffic to your website. Take those phrases and write detailed articles on those topics.

15. In other nonprofit newsletters. Read newsletters from other nonprofits who work in your subject or geographic area for inspiration.

Where else do you look for article ideas? Share your favorite sources by leaving a comment.

Only 37% of nonprofits are tracking the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, according to a new survey by Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention. This is, of course, a real shame, because tracking is what helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how you can be more effective over time. The great news is that there are some very simple and cheap tools you can use to track your online marketing campaigns. In fact, most online marketing tools have tracking built into them — you are already paying for them. You just have to use them.

Websites

Any half-way decent hosting package will include a basic statistics package. Idealware just did a report on web analytic packages that’s definitely worth a read. If you are pressed for time and only want to track a few elements on a monthly basis, my top five would be

- Visits - the number of people looking at each page. This tells you the most popular pages on your site.
- Unique visitors - how many different people are visiting your site, regardless of how many times they returned.
- Referrers - where your visitors were before they came to your site. Are they finding you through Google, by typing in your URL directly, or by clicking on a link from someone else’s site?
- Click Path - where people come into your site, where they go, and where they leave. You can also look at top entry and exit pages, but the full click path gives you a better sense for how people typically use your site.
- Keywords - which words people are using in search engines to find your site (and conversely, which words are important to you that aren’t bringing people in).

Email Newsletters

You really should be using an email newsletter service like Intellicontact or Constant Contact (both of which I recommend) for your e-newsletters and not trying to send them out of Outlook or Thunderbird. More on that some other time. When you use a service like this, you get all kinds of great tracking data. Again, my top five to track would be

- Released or Sent Successfully - your total list minus bounced messages. This helps you track the quality of your list over time. The fewer bounces, the better.
- Open Rate - how many people are opening the email (HTML email only).
- Click Throughs - how many people are clicking on a link in the email. This shows they are reading it and taking action or looking for more information. You can also see which links they are clicking on.
- Forwards - how many people are forwarding your message to someone else.
- Unsubscribes - how many people are getting off your list. Don’t be alarmed if you regularly lose a few people. But if your unsubscribes spike, carefully examine what in that particular message sent people fleeing from your list.

Blogs

Why are you blogging in the first place? The answer will determine what you should be tracking. Register with Feedburner and Technorati to get whatever stats you need that your blogging platform doesn’t provide it. All of the stats above for websites also apply to blogs. In addition to those, you might also track

- Subscribers - how many people have affirmatively shown interest in your blog by subscribing to your RSS feed.
- Technorati Rank - where you rank in the greater blogosphere, as determined by the number and variety of links to your blog.

As you read this list, you may have said “Doh! How obvious!” But are you actually using all of these tools to the fullest? It’s like when I walk around my house on hot summer days looking for the source of that strange smell. After looking in every room for some kid-induced odor source, I usually end up saying, “Doh! It’s the neighbor’s barnyard!” I know it’s there, but it’s become part of the background, and I forget about it. Get these tools back into the foreground and your marketing campaigns will surely improve over time.

Whether it’s a board meeting, a seminar, or a conference, the events your organization hosts or attends can provide great fodder for newsletter articles — if you highlight the most important points and forget about the rest.When you start writing an event summary, you may be tempted to regurgitate the agenda with a few extra details sprinkled in. We’ve all read these kinds of articles and have been bored stiff by them. “John opened the workshop and welcomed the speakers. Fred talked about ABC. We broke for lunch. After lunch, Jane talked about XYZ. It was a successful workshop.” There’s no value for your newsletter readers here.

Instead, pick just a few highlights from the event. Think of the event as a whole and pick the best resources or information from the day. What three things did you learn? What three points surprised you? What would someone who attended the event go back and tell her co-workers around the water cooler? What points would she highlight to the boss, to emphasize that the registration fee was money well spent? If you feel strongly that you need to mention every speaker, pick the single most important or memorable point from each presentation and focus only on that point.

Leave all the boring, mundane and pro forma details out of your article. Welcoming addresses are typically devoid of real substance and don’t need to be mentioned (unless they were given by a very big name). We also don’t need to know what was served for lunch. It’s not unusual for at least one speaker to bomb, and if you were bored in person, imagine how bored your newsletter readers will be if you try to summarize that person’s entire presentation.

Also think about different article formats that you could use to summarize the event, rather than straight reporting. Try “Top Ten Insights from the Workshop” or “How To (Insert Task): Lessons Learned at the Workshop.”

You can wrap up the article by mentioning speakers you didn’t highlight and suggesting ways that newsletter readers can get more information on the topic. For example, if you hosted the event, ask speakers to provide electronic copies of their presentations or handouts for your website. You can also ask readers to mark their calendars for the next event.

Next week will be “Newsletter Week” at Nonprofit Communications, including a post with tips on writing the hardest kind of newsletter article, as determined by this blog’s readers (you!). Problem is, right now there is a four-way tie between “Donor or Volunteer Profiles,” “Program Updates,” “How-to Articles or Tips” and “Event Summaries.” Vote now and help break the tie! You’ll find the poll in the right sidebar of the homepage and in this post.

Copyblogger is showing people how he would rewrite some of their blog headlines, including notes on why he made the changes he did. I do a similar exercise in my newsletter writing courses and it’s always fun. So, let’s try it here. Either leave a comment or send an email to me at kivi *AT* writing911.com. Provide a link to a newsletter article or blog headline you’d like to see rewritten. If you don’t have the article online, email me the original headline and the lead paragraph.

A good newsletter will have several different types of articles in it, and some formats are harder to write than others. Which type of newsletter article is toughest for you to write? Take the poll, or add your own answer. You can also leave a comment on this post. In a week or two, I’ll provide some tips on how to write whichever article you, my readers, say is the hardest.

ALT tags are the bits of text that you can attach to images on webpages and in email messages and e-newsletters. As I explained yesterday, using the ALT tag is essential when including images in email campaigns and e-newsletters, because if the people reading your email have image blocking turned on, they won’t see the image, but they will likely see the ALT text. ALT tags are also needed by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers.

ALT stands for alternative — this text will be shown as an alternative to showing the image itself. Many people advocate that you simply describe what is in the photo, especially for ALT tags on websites. But ALT tags can also be used as marketing text, and this approach makes sense for email where you are most likely trying to encourage some type of action on the reader’s part.

Here are a few tips for your email ALT tags.

1) Always use them! You don’t need them on decorative items like bullets, but use them on all photographs and artwork of significance.

2) Keep them short, but not too short. Don’t use “Logo” when you can use “Smith Community Library Logo.” Shoot for three to seven words.

3) Use words that are meaningful to your readers. Treat writing your ALT tags like you do headlines and captions. Use keywords that will grab your readers’ attention. Don’t say “Kittens at the shelter” when you can say “Kittens ready to be adopted today at the shelter.”

4) Encourage readers to turn images on. Your newsletter will look much better and be more effective if people see the images you placed there. You can use the ALT tag to encourage them to turn on the images. For example, ALT tags like “Turn on images to see why Jim is smiling” or “Turn on images to see what your donations purchased last month” give the reader an incentive. A tag like this on every image would be annoying, but using them sparingly may convince some of your readers to take that extra step to see your images.

I always advise nonprofits to include photos in their print newsletters. But what about images in e-newsletters? The answer is not as clear-cut and here’s why: a large portion of your online readers probably won’t see the images automatically. Worse yet, if you don’t watch your design carefully, these readers may see only a big empty box leading them to quickly delete your email without a second thought. You can learn more about why this is the case at Campaign Monitor and EmailExperience.org.

Given this reality, I say you should play it safe with your email campaigns and e-newsletters and assume that some portion of readers won’t see your images. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include images; it means you should do so carefully. Here are a few guidelines you should follow.

1. Use small images. You don’t want to fill up the viewing pane with an image. Try to keep images under 200 pixels wide. If you use a banner image across the top as a nameplate, keep the height small (under 75 pixels). This will leave you room for your text to appear in the viewing pane.

2. Include great copy as close to the top as possible. Put some extra effort into the text that appears at the top of the message or newsletter. You need to grab your reader with those few words they will see in the preview pane if you are losing some of that space to a blocked image.

3. Always use the ALT tag. When you insert an image in HTML, you have the option of attaching words to that image with an ALT tag. Though it’s not a 100% solution, most readers will see this text even if the image is blocked. (More tips on writing good ALT text tomorrow).

4. Include captions. To keep a caption with your image in an HTML email, create a small table with one column that is the same width as your image and two rows. Put the image in the top row and put the caption in the bottom row. Insert the whole table (image and caption) into your email wherever you want it to appear.

5. Never send image-only messages. I’ve seen event invitations sent via email that are nothing but one solid image. With images off, I see nothing but a big empty box. Bad idea. Never use this approach. Always include text in your emails.